Classy warrior - Polly Toynbee

Polly Toynbee is genuinely concerned about the widening divisions within British society, so she's an obvious target for the populist Right. But that doesn't make her wrong, says David Robinson

HALF-WAY through our interview in her London club, Polly Toynbee looks me straight in the eye and gives a sad smile. "I think you're going to have a go at me," she says. "I think you're going to have a go at me for being middle-class."

If I was, I wouldn't be the first. In cold print, the veteran Guardian journalist attracts screeds of Rightist righteous rage. To Boris Johnson, she's "new Labour's fairy godmother… high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness". To the bloggers, hundreds of them at a time, responding to the columns that even her rivals concede mark her out as one of Britain's most important current social democratic thinkers, she's far worse: a hypocrite, a vintage champagne socialist, a traitor to her class, the kind of person who preaches social equality and sends her children to private school.

Let's start, however, with a prcis of her latest polemic. Britain is, she argues, more unequal than it's ever been since the Second World War, and it's growing more so by the year. To adapt her metaphor, which even the Conservative Party recently flirted with, our society is like a camel train in which the sheikhs up at the front have bolted off into the distance, the stragglers at the end are lagging further and further behind, and the camels in the middle are in danger of losing sight of both.

Result? Lack of social cohesion. Complete absence of social mobility. At the top, CEOs pay themselves 75 times what their workers earn (20 years ago, it was 17 times) and fat cattery goes unchecked even when profits slide (think Northern Rock). In the case of the bankers who brought about the credit crunch the rest of us are now labouring under, or the lawyers who work as a cartel to defend their unrealistic salaries, top people's pay is effectively "a perversion of market principles". While they power ahead, manual workers' pay slips back: thanks to deregulation, this is now lower in relative terms than it was 30 years ago.

And yet to get that caravan back together again, to kickstart atrophied social mobility, to give the poor a chance, the political surgery required is hardly drastic. If the 1,000 richest people in Britain paid 10 per cent in capital gains and 40 per cent in income tax, an extra 12 billion would flow into the Treasury. If corporate tax-avoidance could be ended, you'd double that. Halving child poverty by 2010, by contrast, would cost far less: yours for 3.4 billion.

Implement all of her manifesto, she says, and Britain would still be an unequal society – but no longer dangerously so. The rich would still be rich, taxed slightly higher at European (but nowhere near pip-squeaking) levels; entrepreneurs would still be well rewarded for taking risks; public schools would still be still open for business. There'd be, it's true, a lot of extra support schemes for mothers and young children at the bottom of the heap. But birth would no longer equal destiny as it does now.

She explains all of this across the table from me in her club (membership, she tells me, only 25 a year) with such sweet reasonableness that it is quite hard to understand why she is such a hate figure for the Right. It's hardly a hard Left agenda, after all: like the SDP candidate she once was, she has no time for union power, and many of her reforms – such as using the honours system to reward civic generosity and resolutely closing tax loopholes – sound like sensible centrist tinkering. So just what is it about Polly Toynbee that infuriates the Right so much?

"Certainly, I do get a lot of it; the Kelvin MacKenzies, the Richard Littlejohns," she says. "And I think that's interesting. Because if you look at the people who have been hated most consistently in the Labour government, they're all middle-class women of the Left. They hated Margaret Jay, hated Tessa Blackstone, hate Margaret Hodge, hate Harriet Harman.

"It's a peculiar thing that the Right just can't bear. And when I say, well, are you saying that we should only stand up for our own personal interests in politics, they say no. So what is it? Because there's something visceral with them about middle-class left-wing women that makes them go for the jugular."

But, I ask, isn't she a bit of a hypocrite sending her children to private schools? The answer comes back pat: "That's partly due to living in Lambeth. Back then, the schools there were dire – they're better now, and my grandchildren go to them – so what middle-class people did was to move to Camden or Islington, near a good state school. But we couldn't do that, so we did what the slightly less rich did, which was to send your children to private school if they were struggling miserably in a bad state school."

Her own parents were similarly left-wing (her father was a Communist in the 1930s, a staunch Labour supporter and one of the founders of CND) but that did not deter him from sending her to Badminton boarding school (from which she was expelled after she ran away). Didn't he think they were engines of inequality too?

"Well they are to some extent. Personally, I'd close them all down, but I wouldn't be starry-eyed about what would replace them: you'd just get congregations of middle classes getting together around the better schools and better opportunities. When you look at social mobility, very little of it is actually about what goes on in secondary schools.

"Earlier this week there was a great seminar on social mobility at the London School of Economics. It was riveting but really depressing too, because the conclusion all these economists and sociologists came to was that education had almost no effect on social mobility. It's nearly all happened by the time children are five and it's nearly all family background. By the time they are three, the child of the professional will be already one year ahead of the child of the least educated parents."

Reading her latest book – and even more so with her masterpiece, Hard Work – you start to realise the injustice of the critique of Toynbee as a champagne socialist. Why? Because she's not just writing about those remedial projects, she's visiting them herself to find out whether they actually work, just as, while researching Hard Work, she spent time doing the minimum wage jobs she then wrote about.

Granted, the truly cynical will always say that this is just journalistic gimmickry. But with Toynbee, it's more than that. She's the only woman I've ever met who walked away from Oxford half-way through her history degree in order to work in a sugar factory and a Wimpy Bar.

" I wanted to know a bit more about the world. A lot of middle-class people go straight into their jobs knowing nothing about the world around them, and whether they're going to be managers or journalists there's always a danger that they're going to have a distorted view of the world."

Right from the start, from her gap year between school and university, when she wrote a novel (which was published), and was expelled from Rhodesia, Toynbee was determined that this wasn't going to happen to her. She wasn't going to write frothy lifestyle journalism but, influenced by such great reporters as Studs Terkel and Tony Parker, she was going to find out how real people lived and worked and write about that.

That's what she's always done. So no, how could I possibly have a go at Polly Toynbee for being middle class? She thought herself out of that long ago. I wonder how many of her critics could say that they've done the same. Or that their books, too, challenge the way we should be thinking about this country's future.

• Unjust Rewards: Exposing Greed and Inequality in Britain Today by Polly Toynbee and David Walker is published by Granta, priced 12.99. They will be at the Book Festival on Friday 22 August at 3pm.